TIB RANDLORDS and ROTGUT, 1886-1903 an Essay on Alcohol, Mine Owners and the Working Class, Illustrating the Resolution of A
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TIB RANDLORDS AND ROTGUT, 1886-1903 An essay on alcohol, mine owners and the working class, illustrating the resolution of a contradiction in the early capitalist development of southern Africa. Charles van Onselen In 1903, Thomas Welsh explored what he called "contrasts in African legislationn in an article in the Journal of the African Society. What particularly int~iguedWelsh were some of the difTerences in the law governing the sale of alcohol to Africans in various parts of the empire. More specifically, why was it that there should be one law for the thirty years old colony of Lagos and another, radically different, for the recently acquired Transvaal territory? "Now, what puzzles onet1, wmte Welsh, "is why the 'coloured person1 on the West Coast of Africa should get as much absolute alcohol as he liked ... while the one in the Transvaal gets clapped into gaol if he procmes a glass of beer or spirits .. .?l1 (1) Welsh's question of over 70 years ago was only partly rhetorical, and it deserved an answer from the imperial authorities of the time. It still merits a serious reply from the historians and sociologists of colonialism. For, underlying Welsh's seemingly superficial query, are several issues of considerable interest to scholars. Who advocated colonial liquor legislation and who benefited from it? What principles governed these decisions and how and when were they arrived at? Why did the imperialists adopt different strategies of social control in various parts of Africa? This paper will not attempt to answer these questions within the framework of a comparative study embracing Lagos and the Transvaal. To do that would require a lengthy and sophisticated examination of the differences between mercantile and industrial capital when, on the one hand, it seeks to exploit peasant producers spread throughout the countryside W, on the other, a working class concentrated in urban areas. Instead, this analysis will be largely confined to the Transvaal. It will seek to answer some of the questions raised, and to demonstrate the complex interaction between alcohol, black workers and capitalism during the period between l886 and 1903. The Black Worker as Consumer: the Rise of the Liquor Industry, 1881-1896 On the 4th October 1881, the Volksraad of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) passed article 44. This granted a Hungarian mining engineer, Alois Hugho Nellmapius, a concession "for the sole right to manufacture from grain, potatoes, and other products growable in the Transvaal, excepting tree-fdts and grapes, and the right to sell in bulk and bottle free of licence" such spirits. (2) Nellmapius, a close friend of State President Kruger, was granted this original concession for a period of fifteep years, on condition that the distillery was operational by at least the 1st of July 1882. (3) Weeks before this, however, on 7th June 1882, Nellmapius, in return for a 20% share, ceded the concession to a partnership comprising himself, the cousins Isaac and Barnet Lewis, and Barnet's brothesin-law - Sa,unny Marks. (4) It was this partnership which gave birth to De Eerste Fabrieken in de Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek Ltd, and in June 1883 a proud President Kruger personally opened the new distillery and christened it "Volk~hoop~~. A director of the distillery at a later date, Hugh Crawford, was therefore largely correct when he noted that: "The distillery was established, and its operations commenced before the goldfields of either Barbeton or the Transvaal were discovered, and at a time when the country was poor, its population small, and business very limited. (5) These early business realities, however, did not prevent the Volksraad from continuing to perceive the factory as llVolkshoopll.As the economic climate in the Transvaal changed in the mid-1800s, so the llhoopvof the tlvolkt'grew. When asked to modify and confirm the terms of the concession on 23rd June 1885, members of the Raad took the opportunity to make additional demands for development. In return for extending the monopoly for a period of thirty years, until 30th June 1912, they insisted on the statets receiving an annual payment of 81,000 and a guarantee that a glass factory and cooperage works would be erected at the factory. (6) In return, the company was to continue to benefit from an exemption from any other form of taxation. These additional development requirements specified by the Volksraad extended the companyts resources - none more so than the glass factory,which was ultimately constructed only in 1894. (7) The dramatically changed economic conditions in the Transvaal from the mid-1880s, however, assisted the compaqy. In particular, the rapid growth and development of the Witwatersrand goldfields transformed the likelihood of business success for "Volkshoop" from probability to certainty. In May 1889 it was noted of the distillery that, from "a very modest beginning on a tentative scale, its success has become unprecedently rapid, and it is now developing itself into a great industry". (8) The tangible proof of the emergence of a "great industryt1was to be found on the 4,000 acre site of the distillery on the banks of the Pienaars river, some 10 miles east of Pretoria. On what was formerly S- Marks's Hat2ierley farm there arose a reservoir with a capacity of l70,OOO gallons of water, a thirty-horse-power plant for electricity generation, a fo~storeycentral distillation plant, a boarding house for accommodating white workers, houses for married European employees, and suitably prestigious separate house for the distillery manager. (9) The buildings most likely to attract the attention of the Transvaal burghers, however, were the three large grain stores, each with a capacity of 5,000 bags. These stores, and indeed the entire factory site, could be viewed from managing director Marksls "splendid residencet1some 1% miles away at Zwartkoppies. (10) By 1889-90, the factory had in its employment at least fifty white and over one hundred Afxican workers. (11) In mid-December 1889, the German distillation plant was working at full capacity and. pmducing 1,000 gallons of proof spirit per day from grain supplied exclusively by Transvaal burghers. Even this output, however, was insufficient to maintain stocks, and the management embarked on a programme of expansion. (12) New boilers, kilns, malting floors, stills and storage space were all being added to the fabtory when a fire bmke out and disrupted production in mid- December 1889. (13) The setback caused by the fire proved less serious than it might have been and the company merely lost two months' production. What concerned Marks and his colleagues more, however, was the fact that the distillery had been left uninsured and that the fire was considered to be the work of an arsonist. (14) The owners of the factory were sufficiently convinced of this theory to offer "a £2,000 reward for the apprehension and conviction of the person or persons implicated in this fiendish act". (15) In the months after the fire the reward remained unclaimed, the distillery was insured, and the owners took the opportunity of making a change in the factory management. Thomas Strachan, a man with experience "at one of the largest distilleries in the world", replaced the previous manager, Stokes. (16) Under Strachan1s management the business experienced steady improvement and expansion. The resources of the company were again stretched, however, when a second fire broke out in the four-storey distillery building on the 29th Ma~r1891. But, since the plant had been insured for £6,000 and the maturing stock carefully isolated from the distillery proper, the effect of the fire was again perhaps less serious than it mi&t have been. (17) Nevertheless, these setbacks, when combined with the excellent prospects of the company and the need for expansion, left De Eerste Fabrieken in de Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek Beperk relatively starved of badly needed capital. Marks1s solution to this problem was to allow the company to go public. In November 1892, in exchange for £122,000 rwd shares, the holders of the concession made it over to Eerste Fabrieken Hatherley Distillery Limited. (18) With the advantage of a listing on the London Stock Bkchange, Hatherley Distillery was able to attract international as well as national capital, and the company was on the threshold of a period of spectacular expansion. Seldom, if ever, could ambitious plans for industrial expansion have been launched into a safer or more sympathetic business environment. What more could capitalists ask for than a government-granted monopoly in a rapidly expanding market? As the sole local producer of cheap spirits for African consumption, Hatherley Distillery found itself catering for a market of 14,000 black miners in 1890, 88,000 in 1897, and an enomous 100,000 by 1899. Privileged access to a market that expanded by nearly ten times in as many years was an important part of the Hatherley success story. It was not only the size of Hatherleyfsmarket that was important, but its quality. In particular, the fact that the majority of the 100,000 strong work-force was drawn from Mozambique was of the utmost importance. For at least several decades prior to the industrialization of the Witwatersrand the peasants and workers of Mozambique had been sold large quantities of wine and spirits - inferior quality alcohol that flowed from the vats and economy of metropolitan Portugal.. There is substantial evidence to show that the more proletarianized Africans of southern rural Mozambique, and the black workers of the urban areas along the coast, were considerably addicted to alcohol by the early 1890s. (19) In 1894,.the British consul in Mozambique, W. A. Churchill, noted how large quantities of spirits were sold in "up country storesw, and that black workers "spent the greater part of their wages in alcohol, known as Kaffir rum1 .